If You Start With The Presumption That Deportation Is Too Harsh Of A Punishment For Being Here Illegally…

….then it’s impossible to ever stop illegal immigration. It’s like having a “keep off the grass” sign win a heavily trafficked area without putting any penalties in place for walking on the grass. We’re doing the same thing with illegal immigration. Obviously, we’re not going to shoot anyone coming into the country illegally and if we’re allowing them to stay here, even if they’re caught, we’re putting a huge incentive in place that will ensure a perpetual flood of illegal immigrants into our country.

Any amnesty bill will that can pass will have a cutoff date—say March 1, 2013—after which you aren’t allowed to sneak into the country and claim an amnesty. You’ll have to prove you were here before then through purchase receipts or other evidence, which some people who “rush” in after March 1 will try to falsify.

Under Rubio’s plan, apparently, there would be a second cutoff—say a year after the first cutoff—after which even those illegals who were here before March 1 couldn’t obtain their “probationary legal status” even if they’d qualified.

What if they could prove they were here but claimed they had been having trouble coming up with the money to pay their “fine” and “back taxes,” and had stayed in the shadows past the deadline?

Let’s assume Rubio would be a hard-ass and tell these late applicants “tough luck.” (What’s he going to do then, deport them all? There might be more of them than he seems to think, at least if the fines are at all substantial.)

So, they’re going to give the illegals that are already here an amnesty and then declare that anyone else who shows up illegally is out of luck. SURE they are…but wait: aren’t we going to hear that we need to allow those illegals into the US as part of an effort to appeal to Hispanic voters? Aren’t we going to be told it’s unreasonable to deport them? Aren’t we going to be told that they’re just “immigrants” as well?

Meanwhile, all the illegals that we’ve already allowed into the country will be demanding that we let the new illegals in and the same group of feckless conservatives who are claiming that amnesty is the fix for our problem with Hispanics now will do the math, notice that there are even more Hispanic Americans and use the same faulty logic that they’re using now to call for another amnesty.

So again, this brings us back to one of the most basic questions about the McCain/Rubio amnesty: How can you ever realistically deal with the problem of illegal immigration if you’re not willing to come out in favor of deporting people who’re caught breaking the law?